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\begin{abstract}

The market for transmitting voice over broadband IP networks (VoIP) is growing at a rapid pace. As VoIP systems become more relied on as a primary means of voice communication, monitoring and management becomes of greater importance. VoIP has specific monitoring and management needs. As a real time application its network needs are more demanding than data. Latency, packet loss and jitter must be carefully managed to provide acceptable quality of service (QoS). Additionally telephony has many metrics and features which need to be conveyed effectively and efficiently. The telephony service and the underlying network must be managed side by side.

Current VoIP management solutions are generally propriety and require administrators to  have specific knowledge of VoIP technologies. Most solutions condense information into tables and 2D graphs. We have recognised a gap in the market for a management tool which has high usability and communicates large volumes of complex data efficiently and effectively.

We have designed a unique monitoring and management system for VoIP called LAMS. LAMS is based on L3DGEWorld, an open source 3D visualisation application for monitoring networks. LAMS generates a 3D virtual world which reflects in real time an operational VoIP system. LAMS maps telephony and network metrics to visual characteristics of objects in the virtual world. For example the bandwidth being consumed by a VoIP server may be mapped to the size of its virtual counter-part. In this way critical information is communicated to the user at a glance. When administrators are immersed in the LAMS virtual world their interaction with virtual objects invokes actions on the real world system.

We created a prototype of LAMS based on the scenario of a small organisation which operates a small distributed IP PBX. We emulated the organisation's network using minimum specification hardware under lab conditions. We constructed a virtual world for the scenario which allows the company to monitor their PBX according to their needs.

The prototype was tested for its network overhead, its hardware requirements and its success in conveying monitoring information. It was found that LAMS can support up to 11 VoIP servers, each with up to 90 VoIP clients. The traffic produced by monitoring numerous VoIP servers is negligible. During our usability tests we found that the advantage of representing information in 3D is the instantaneous overview of the state of the VoIP system compared to the historical data 2D graphs present. 
\end{abstract} 
